Pages

Thursday, May 01, 2003

My College Attitude

Today is my last day of classes. I’m done with all of them after today. It’s just hitting me now that another year of school is drawing to a close and after next semester my college career will be completely finished. Cue panic attack. I panic not because I have a lot to finish this next week, but because I only have another week here. For some, a week may seem like it is utterly too long because they just want to be done or to be out of here, but I truly enjoy my time here.

I’ve noticed that most of my fellow seniors have fallen into their senior slide—not going to class, blowing off assignments, and not giving a crap about learning during this, their last semester. It is interesting to me that I have not fallen into that mind-set. Instead, I have actually become more of an attentive and dedicated student this semester. I’m routinely disappointed in the attitudes of most of my classmates in my senior seminar class because they simply don’t care about anything.

Here’s an average class: Only about ¾ of the class shows up on any given day—sometimes more, but more often less. We have been discussing moral philosophy and law, both controversial topics, but they never seem to illicit conversation or discussion from the class. The majority of the people stare blankly at our professor while I try to stimulate discussion. Many times there will be a 2-3 minute lull of nothing before either I propose a question or our professor starts talking about something else that would possibly spark conversation. Doesn’t anyone care?

I guess it is just so sad to see all of these people not care about learning at all. I guess maybe I’m just too much of a nerd or something. Half of the time the people that do come into class are still suffering from hangovers that they got from the night before. Am I really missing out on that much by not going out and getting plowed at the bars every other night? Maybe that’s an essential part of college I’m missing, but I really have a hard time convincing myself of that, especially with all of the bad things that have happened to one of my roommates and his friends at the bars. I’m still amazed that they still keep going back. They’ve had one of their friends severely beaten up and almost every weekend the group that goes out has a big fight and someone hates someone else because of how they acted at the bar. It seems like such an exercise in stupidity, but maybe I’m missing something.

I guess I just don’t know what to think, but I had better start thinking about logic soon as I have a test this afternoon. Predicate logic—should be fun. It’s not that it is that hard, I’m just always afraid I’ll mix up some of the exceptions that we have to remember. “Always existentially instantiate before you universally instantiate or else you won’t be able to universally generalize following arguments” and “DeMorgan’s Laws are an equivalence rule that can be applied to portions of a statement, while contraposition is an implicational rule that must be applied to an entire atomic statement” are a couple of the things that I have to always remember, along with others. It’s not really as hard as I make it out to sound, but I just want to make sure I know everything. I suppose I should go look that stuff over now.